YOU SUCK, YOU DUMB MOON.

“Fuck you, moon!”

I'd put in for that Kickstarter.

+1

The great irony would be if we spend vast resources on space exploration while our civilization crumbles, and it the last days before the collapse we find out that life is extremely rare in the universe.

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” -- Vonnegut

A good point, since it's impossible for our species to work on two goals at once.

MisterYuck, I'd agree with you if I had any faith that the current political climate would allow for both. Or either, even.
I never said we shouldn't do both, I'm responding to the speaker asserting that Mars should be "our next challenge." If we're prioritizing like that, then I disagree. The climate (IMHO) is more pressing.

OK, fair enough.

If Fred Armisen and George Clooney had an instantly adult baby.

This post set off some red flags for me so I looked up the user's background and wow he isn't a scientist either! He doesn't even work at NASA! The closest thing to credentials I could find is hundreds of posts about drum machines.

Totally unqualified to comment, so irresponsible.

Come on man, why you gotta be so cynical.

The biggest red flag is that he had to look up Robert Zubrin. The guy's a legend.

I get OZ's criticism: Zubrin has an image of the capital-S Scientist that is about 300 years out of date. And the guy's a self-righteous prick. But it's all in service of getting that rocket built, the one that I think all scientists see more and more as our best chance at a mulligan.

There are no mulligans. No matter what starry-eyed dreamers fantasize about, we're stuck here. There's nothing better anywhere in reach, so all we can do is try to minimize the damage we're doing to the one place in the universe we evolved to inhabit.

At best, space travel can allow a very small number of people to live in stunningly miserable circumstances for a short period of time. There is no other Earth.

"Life could be better for you, in the Off World Colonies!"

Where have we heard that before...

I'm not so sure, bb. A very small number of people living in stunningly miserable circumstances for a short period of time is how this whole ride got started. At any rate, even that pitiful result would make the Mars program a better investment than most current human endeavors (with all due respect to dank memes).